About Friggin' Time

Finally, something that should have been a no brainer from day one. According to this AP article (posted on Yahoo news), the Bush Administration has finally decided to "grant" Geneva Convention rights to the detainees and Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

This represents a huge setback to the Presidential power grab, nearly five years after the start of the war on terror, that the President does not have the power to arbitrarily create new categories of people and then claim that traditional rights do not apply to those people.

The fact is, prior to the start of the so-called War on Terror, there were essentially two categories of people in custody: Prisoner of War and non-wartime criminals. Those in the first category were clearly covered under the Geneva Convention, those in the second were covered by our Constitution and our laws (which dictate the powers and procedures of our government, even when dealing with non-citizens).

It was never anything but semantics to define a new category ("Enemy Combatant" and then claim that this new category was due neither set of protections.

And finally, after far too long a time, the United States has been steered back onto the path of morality again. Finally, we have to admit that such word parsing and re-defining does not allow us (or our President) to circumvent the laws of the nation.

Good for us! A proud day to be an American.

Liam.